A-Number-One Volunteer: Alum Devotes Time, Energy to Serving and Promoting College of Agriculture

By: Jamie Creamer

Ray Hilburn is one of those people who gets by on four, maybe five, hours of sleep a night.

It's a good thing, too. That's all he's got time for.

Hilburn is a man on the move, a man in perpetual overdrive and one who, at a year shy of half a century, honestly has never known the meaning of the word burnout.

"People ask me how do I fight burnout, and the only answer I can give them is that I really and truly enjoy what I do," the AU Ag alumnus says. "I mean it when I say, I have never been bored a day in my life."

If he isn't at work in his job as poultry programs director with the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, he's out somewhere, doing something, volunteering his time and his absolutely endless energy to some cause he believes in.

Foremost among those: the College of Agriculture at Auburn University.

His volunteer efforts earned him the college's first Dean's Workhorse Award in 2004 and, on a national scale, the 2005 Volunteer Service Award from the National Agricultural Alumni and Development Association.

That latter award has some tough criteria. To qualify, a nominee should have given freely of his or her time to further the goals of their institution, have demonstrated the ability to lead and organize and have demonstrated the desire to inspire and encourage others to support the institution.

That's Ray Hilburn in a nutshell.

Says CoAg Assistant Dean Bill Alverson, "Ray comes as close as anybody ever could to being the perfect volunteer."

He is an extremely active member of and leader in the AU Agricultural Alumni Association. Since serving as president in the late 1990s, he has remained an at-large member and has chaired probably every committee the association has.

You'll often find him at the CoAg graduation breakfasts, promoting membership in the Ag Alumni Association. And at the College's annual Fall Roundup and Taste of Alabama, he's everything from a traffic cop to emcee of the scholarship-fund-raising auction.

He's also one of the college's best student recruiters, particularly in his native Crenshaw County. For the past 11 years, he has personally arranged, cooked for and hosted Ag Career Days in Luverne, where he has introduced hundreds of high school juniors and seniors to Auburn University's College of Agriculture.

"Four years ago, we got the valedictorian, the salutatorian and the top two honor graduates at Luverne to enroll in the college," Hilburn proudly says. And if he happens to put a little extra emphasis on poultry science in his recruiting, don't hold that against him. That's where his strongest loyalties lie. That was his major.

It wasn't what he had planned. In fact, when Hilburn enrolled in AU in the fall of 1974, he wanted as far away from agriculture-and, specifically, poultry-as he could get. He'd spent his whole life already working at his daddy's poultry hatchery just outside of Luverne, and that was enough of that.

Throughout high school, he'd been heavy into sports, a near obsession that created more than a little conflict with his dad.

"Playing sports meant staying after school to practice, and that rubbed my daddy the wrong way," Hilburn says. "He wanted me at home, working."

On more than one occasion, Hilburn told anyone who was listening that, once he got out of Luverne, "if I never see another chicken again, it'll be too soon."

So it was that, when he came to Auburn, he didn't so much as glance at Ag Hill. His goal was to major in health and physical education and coach sports for a living.

Before that first quarter was over, though, Hilburn began to have second thoughts about spending his life as a physical education teacher, so he switched to accounting. Says Hilburn, "I'd always been good with numbers."

He lasted all of one quarter in accounting. The problem there was that Hilburn was then, is now and forever will be a "people" person. ("People are my hobby," he says.) He admitted that he couldn't see himself sitting at a desk crunching numbers all day.

He wound up in poultry science by default.

"I needed a job, and the only place where I knew anybody to ask about one was the poultry (research) farm," says Hilburn, who had three older brothers who had worked at the farm when they were at Auburn in the 1960s and early '70s. But when he went to apply, he was told that only poultry science majors were eligible to work there.

"Heck, I needed a job, and I needed a major, so I switched to poultry science," Hilburn says.

Immediately, Hilburn felt at home, not only because of his poultry background but also because of the people in the department and the college.

"It was like family," says Hilburn, who was one of only 12 undergraduates in poultry science at the time. "It was the kind of thing where, I had Dr. (J.G.) Cottier, and if you missed class, he'd call you at home and want to know why."

After earning his bachelor's degree in 1978, Hilburn went to work with ConAgra for three years as a broiler and breeder technician, then hired on with the state agriculture department in Montgomery, where he's remained for 23-plus years now.

There, he manages the National Poultry Improvement Plan, a federal-state-industry program designed to prevent and control egg-transmitted, hatchery-disseminated poultry diseases.

And, by the way, Mr. I-Don't-Want-To-See-Another-Chicken and his four brothers also farm in a partnership, Hilburn Farms, which includes 100 head of brood cattle-and four broiler houses.

He still lives in Luverne-or, specifically, in the Luverne suburb of Rutledge-and that means an hour-and-five-minute commute to and from work every day, but Hilburn doesn't mind the drive.

"I travel all over the state with my job, so on the days when I'm in the office, I consider that one of my 'light' traveling days," he says.

The father of three sons-22, 21 and 16-would just rather be near his family in Crenshaw County, where you'll find him active in everything from his church to the county industrial development board to Dixie Youth baseball.

"I don't hunt, I don't fish, I don't play golf," Hilburn says. "My hobby is people. I just love being around people. Other people are what life's about."

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